3gs

I'll be honest with you: I hate customer service as much as you do. The long waits, the anonymous feeling of phone calls, the paperwork...it's like a doctor's appointment. Maybe that's why many people I speak to simply don't bother. My dad always calls me before bothering to spend time trying to reach Apple. A friend let his bricked Xbox 360 sit in a drawer for two years rather than try to call for a repair.

As for me, my fear comes from broken headphones. At least once a year, it seems, some pair … Read more

It's never too late to revisit two smartphones with some of the hottest hardware specs on the market. iFixit's side-by-side breakdown of the internals of the Google Nexus One and Apple iPhone 3GS makes a compelling cost and feature argument for the Nexus One.

iFixit's CEO Kyle Wiens sums it up nicely: "The Nexus One deserves more attention. Its hardware is really quite impressive, and yet no one seems to be buying it!" he said in a note sent out Thursday morning. (Though CNET's Tom Krazit makes the case here that it's not quite that simple.)

On the downside, if something goes awry internally, the Nexus One is up against a formidable infrastructure of Apple stores. "Our biggest beef with the Nexus One? There isn't a parts supply chain for it yet, meaning all repairs have to go through HTC's overpriced mail-in service," Wiens said.

And a quick look at the silicon inside these phones shows how utterly absent Intel is in this space. In short, Samsung rules.

What follows below are two graphics excerpts from iFixit's teardown. Also, see this CNET Reviews camera showdown.

… Read more

With the recent release of DisplayMate Multimedia Edition for Mobile Displays, a battery of tests to measure the quality of portable screens--and apparently because I'm a glutton for punishment--I thought now would be the perfect time to bring five popular smartphones back to CNET Labs for a down-and-dirty comparison of their screen performance.

The five phones I chose to put through the ringer (ahem) are the Samsung Behold II, the Motorola Droid, the Apple iPhone 3GS, the HTC Nexus One by Google, and the Palm Pre Plus. These five were chosen because of their relative popularity and similar feature sets.

We used three different types of tests to evaluate each phone:

Scientific measurements: We used the Konica Minolta CS-200 ChromaMeter to test the maximum brightness, black level, and contrast ratio of each phone and reported numbers for each of these three tests.

Test pattern screens: We used several DisplayMate Mobile test patterns to test for color-tracking errors, 24-bit color, and font legibility, among others.

Real-world: Finally, we conducted real-world anecdotal testing using 3D games, photos, and a little tool I like to call "the Sun" to test the diffuse reflectance of each display.

All test screens were viewed within each phone's native gallery application. Some phones may handle pictures differently--and even improve them to some extent--outside the application. That said, we believe that testing within the respective gallery applications is still a viable test as this is where most users will view pictures on their phones.

In order to diminish potential repetition, I'll dive right into the details of how each phone performed; if you'd like to know more about our tests, you can binge off nerdy details in our "How we tested" section at the bottom of this article. Please note that this is an evaluation of each phone's screen performance and nothing else. Check out the full reviews of these phones to determine which is right for you. Also, DisplayMate recently conducted a more technically focused evaluation of the iPhone 3GS' and the Nexus One's screens that I recommend you take a look at.

The bottom line… Read more

A recent survey stated what should be obvious: In 2010, three years after the iPhone was announced, many BlackBerry owners continue to covet the iPhone.

For me, a longtime BlackBerry user, that survey result was poignant: it came just as I was grappling with BlackBerry Storm 2 problems. While the survey does show that most BlackBerry owners plan to keep their phones, the salient point is that the loyalty rate is much lower for BlackBerry owners compared to their iPhone counterparts.

Here's a statement from Crowd Science, the organization behind the survey. "These results show that the restlessness … Read more

The big news of the day is the announcement of when Apple's latest creation, the iPad, will be available. According to Apple, the "magical and revolutionary" product will be in stores April 3 starting at $499, but you can preorder the device as early as March 12. Only the Wi-Fi model will be available at first, with the Wi-Fi/3G capable iPad to come later in April.

There is already plenty of analysis all over the Web about who will buy the iPad and whether it's truly a viable alternative to laptops and Netbooks. Most reviewers … Read more

The first version of the BlackBerry Storm was widely panned for its shortcomings, but the Storm 2 has its own set of flaws, based on my extended use of the phone.

The updated Storm was announced back in October of last year so the phone has been out there for a while. And long enough for me to realize that it has a couple of fairly serious issues--at least the particular phone that I use does.

Let me be clear, I am a longtime user of both the original Storm and now the Storm 2. And I actually had fewer complaints about the original, frequently criticized Storm than the relatively well-received Storm 2.

Buttons: What's my beef? The most persistent problem is with the four buttons at the base of the screen (see photo). Simply put, sometimes the buttons don't work. This can be an annoying problem because these buttons must be used constantly.

As one example, the buttons used to make and end a call often don't work. Only after poking repeatedly on a precise location on the button (or tapping on the main screen, then tapping the button) can I make or end a call.

Again, that's only one of the more pesky problems but there are more examples of other buttons not working. And, in my experience, the problem is only fixed temporarily by rebooting the phone. That is not an acceptable solution for me since… Read more

Obviously, most of the apps I write about in this space are favorites of mine with all the features I could ask for, but some apps I come across just need one or more tweaks to make them better. Whether it's a control issue in a game or some other feature I think the developers left out, I use the app or play the game thinking, if it only had this one extra thing, it could be truly great!

This week, I have a couple of apps that do so many things well, but lack in only a couple … Read more

Macworld Expo 2010 started on Tuesday here in San Francisco, and will continue through tomorrow (Saturday) at the Moscone Center. I had a chance to walk the expo floor on Thursday and though there weren't nearly as many vendors as in years past, I was able to talk to a few iPhone developers about their products and all seemed excited about showing off their latest projects.

Even though Apple is no longer in attendance at Macworld, Moscone North was crowded with throngs of Mac and iPhone fans, looking at the latest software, peripherals, and gear. While the big Apple … Read more

Although Apple's iPad has yet to hit the market, the Federal Communications Commission has expressed concern over its potential impact on AT&T's 3G network.

Without naming AT&T, which has secured a carrier deal for the tablet device, Phil Bellaria, director of scenario planning, and John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, outlined their concerns in an FCC blog post Monday:

With the iPad pointing to even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon, we must ensure that network congestion doesn't choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing, … Read more